was ready to die.”  Dr. Bentley suggests that unfriendly feelings may have existed against Mr. English in consequence of some controversies he had been engaged in with the town about the title to lands; that the superior style in which his family lived had subjected them to vulgar prejudice; that the existence of this feeling becoming known to the “afflicted girls” led them to cry out against him and his wife.  It may be so.  They availed themselves of every such advantage; and particularly liked to strike high, so as the more to astound and overawe the public mind.

I find no further mention of Sarah Morrel.  She doubtless shared the fate of those escaping death,—­a long imprisonment.  When Dorcas Hoar was brought in, there was a general commotion among the afflicted, falling into fits all around.  After coming out of them, they vied with each other in heaping all sorts of accusations upon the prisoner; Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam charging her with having choked a woman in Boston; Elizabeth Hubbard crying out that she was pinching her, “and showing the marks to the standers by.  The marshal said she pinched her fingers at the time.”  The magistrate, indignantly believing the whole, said, “Dorcas Hoar, why do you hurt these?”—­“I never hurt any child in my life.”  The girls then charged her with having killed her husband, and with various other crimes.  Mary Walcot, Susanna Sheldon, and Abigail Williams said they saw a black man whispering in her ear.  The spirit of the prisoner was raised; and she said, “Oh, you are liars, and God will stop the mouth of liars!” The anger of the magistrates was roused by this bold outbreak.  “You are not to speak after this manner in the Court.”—­“I will speak the truth as long as I live,” she fearlessly replied.  Parris says, at the close of his account, “The afflicted were much distressed during her examination.”  Of course, she was sent to prison.

Susanna Martin of Amesbury, a widow, was arrested on a warrant dated April 30, and examined at the Village church May 2.  She is described as a short active woman, wearing a hood and scarf, plump and well developed in her figure, of remarkable personal neatness.  One of the items of the evidence against her was, that, “in an extraordinary dirty season, when it was not fit for any person to travel, she came on foot” to a house at Newbury.  The woman of the house, the substance of whose testimony I am giving, having asked, “whether she came from Amesbury afoot,” expressed her surprise at her having ventured abroad in such bad walking, and bid her children make way for her to come to the fire to dry herself.  She replied “she was as dry as I was,” and turned her coats aside; “and I could not perceive that the soles of her shoes were wet.  I was startled at it, that she should come so dry; and told her that I should have been wet up to my knees, if I should have come so far on foot.”  She replied that “she scorned to have a drabbled tail.”  The good woman who treated Susanna Martin on this occasion with such hospitable kindness received the impression, as appears by the import of her deposition, that, because Martin came into the house so wonderfully dry, she was therefore a witch.  The only inference we are likely to draw is, that she was a particularly neat person; careful to pick her way; and did not wear skirts of the dimensions of our times.